Cooking with red wine and chocolate + a GIVEAWAY!

Posted on December 28, 2010 by HotBloggerNic


COMMENTS ARE CLOSED. Thank you for entering! If you did not provide additional comments letting us know that you tweeted or shared on Facebook about this contest please send us an email at 2hotbloggers[at]gmail[dot]com. We want to make sure you get credit for your bonus entries. We will be announcing the winner on Saturday, so come back to find out if you won! CHEERS!

Earlier this month Melanie from Mel, A Dramatic Mommy asked if I would help her review PURE DARK artisanal chocolates and pair them with wine for a new site I contribute to, SD MOMfia.  Sample chocolate?  You know I didn’t hesitate to say yes!

Pairing chocolate and wine can be tricky.  You don’t want to ruin the sweetness of the chocolate or the body of the wine.  In the past I have failed miserably in pairing wine and chocolate, so I did some research because if you get the combination right you will impress any dinner guest.  Rule of thumb is to make sure your the sweetness of your wine is equal to the sweetness of the chocolate.  You want to pair lighter-bodied wine with lighter chocolate and fuller-bodied wine with darker chocolate.  For example, white chocolate with a Sherry or milk chocolate with a Riesling or a Muscat.  Since PURE DARK’s chocolates start at 60% cocoa and go up to 80% cocoa you will want to pair them with with a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Zinfandel.  You can also combine chocolate covered fruit like PURE DARK Chocolate Covered Blueberries with a Claret which contains aromas of blueberries.

If you are still nervous about pairing wine and chocolate you can try cooking with them!  Chef Samara Salisbury created the following recipe exclusively for PURE DARK™.

PURE DARK

Red Wine-Dark Chocolate Sauce*
Serves 4

INGREDIENTS:

  • 1 large shallot, minced
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 5 sprigs fresh thyme
  • 2 Tbsp. good quality balsamic vinegar
  • 2 cups red wine (Merlot, Zinfandel or Cabernet)
  • 1/2 cup port wine
  • 1/4 tsp. whole black peppercorns
  • 1/4 cup chicken stock
  • 3 Tbsp. unsalted butter, cold and cut in small cubes
  • salt and black pepper to taste
  • 2 oz. PURE DARK™ Slab, broken into small pieces

DIRECTIONS:

  1. In small sauce pan, combine first seven ingredients. Bring to a simmer and reduce for 25 minutes.
  2. Strain sauce into another small sauce pan discarding shallot, garlic, thyme and black peppercorns.
  3. Return sauce to medium heat and add chicken stock. Allow to simmer for 3-4 minutes.
  4. Reduce heat to low and add PURE DARK™ Slab, stir until chcolate is melted.
  5. Remove sauce from heat and add cold butter, swirl until sauce is thickened and has a nice sheen.
  6. Season to tast with salt and black pepper

*This is great sauce to use during the Spring/Summer grilling season. It pairs well with rib-eye, beef tenderloin, chicken breast or pork tenderloin.

GIVEAWAY:
You can find PURE DARK chocolates in specialty shops, but we are giving away a $20 gift card to spend at the PURE DARK online store. Thank you PURE DARK for providing the gift card for the giveaway!

THE RULES:
For this contest, there is one official entry and two bonus entries available.  The deadline to enter is January 11, 2011 at 11:59pm PT.  We will will use random.org to draw the winner and post the results/notify winner via email, so we MUST have a way to get in touch with you!  If the notified winner has not responded within 48 hours a new winner will be chosen.  The contest is open to US entrants only.

OFFICIAL ENTRY:
You MUST leave a comment below telling us if you have ever tried cooking with wine & chocolate or have a wine/chocolate pair that you love.

BONUS ENTRIES:
Bonus entry #1: Follow us on Twitter and tweet “Enter to win a $20 gift card for PURE DARK chocolate from @2HotBloggers: http://bit.ly/eyvEYB #giveaway #puredark #chocolate”. Then come back here and leave us a new comment letting us know you tweeted it.

Bonus entry #2: “Like” our page on Facebook and share this giveaway on your profile.  Then come back here and leave us an additional comment letting us know you shared it.

For another chance to win, Melanie is also hosting her own PURE DARK giveaway.

Cheers and Bon Appetit!

Posted in Giveaways, Recipes | 63 Comments

Leftover holiday wine?

Posted on December 26, 2010 by HotBloggerMiss

Now I know to some of you, left over wine is a mystery. I mean really, who ends up with leftover wine? You are our core audience, right there.

However… some of us, especially those of us that live with two non-wine drinking parents (I inherited my good taste in alcohol from my grandmother ok?) tend to end up with left over wine. This also means that I end up pouring a lot of it down the drain, all the while weeping.

Once you open a bottle of wine, it begins to change. Oxygen does funny things to wine. An open bottle has a shelf life, depending on the type, on average of 2-3 days. This can be extended a day or so if you put the wine in the refrigerator but if you’ve ever poured a glass from a bottle you opened 5 days ago, there is a significant difference in taste.

Leftover wine has a similar shelf life. You leave it open and sitting for too long and it becomes sour. It starts to separate and will eventually turn into vinegar but that is another post for another day.

Let’s talk about cooking with your leftover wine. Your two hot bloggers are not cooks. Let’s just throw that out there right now. BUT! We are here to talk about wine and the most natural thing to do with that left over holiday wine is to cook with it.

I know the first food I think to make with leftover wine is marinara sauce. We found a great recipe for you on AllRecipes.com which rocks:

Ingredients

  • 2 (28 ounce) cans whole peeled tomatoes
  • 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
  • 4 tablespoons olive oil
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
  • 1/2 tablespoon salt
  • 1/2 cup red wine

Directions

  1. In a medium bowl, blend the whole tomatoes and paste; reserve.
  2. In a large saucepan, warm olive oil over medium-low heat and add garlic; cook for a few minutes, but make sure to not brown the garlic.
  3. Pour tomato mixture in saucepan and stir; cook over medium heat for 10 minutes. Add parsley, salt and wine; reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally, until sauce thickens; serve.

Now, make sure you go and check out the comments on the post. A lot of people add their own tips that might just benefit you too. The great thing about this website is, you can calculate how much you want to serve and the site will alter the recipe for you. The original recipe above yields 4 servings.

I would suggest making a batch of this and freezing it. Buy yourself some of those disposable plastic containers and stock up. This way you can defrost your sauce for pizza, spaghetti, anything that you might want to use a good marinara sauce for.

We’ll be sharing more recipes over time be sure to come back and visit us soon. We’re planning on making 2011 a great year for enjoying wine and we hope that you will join us!

Cheers!

Posted in Recipes, Wines | 4 Comments

Merry Christmas from 2 Hot Bloggers

Posted on December 23, 2010 by 2HotBloggers

We wish you a very Merry Christmas
from our family to yours! Cheers!

Posted in Photos | 1 Comment

A Fun Stocking Stuffer

Posted on December 20, 2010 by HotBloggerMiss

My mom got these great Red Wine playing cards in a gift basket from our next door neighbor.  The cards provide information about the 52 different red wine grapes and the wines they make. This would be a great stocking stuffer for any red wine lover.  You can get them on Amazon.com for $10!

image

Posted in Gadgets, Red | 1 Comment

Room 704 Archives: How To Make a Wine Journal – September 2010

Posted on September 1, 2010 by 2HotBloggers

We had an amazing opportunity this month to sit down with Mollie, an employee at our favorite wine bar, The Colorado Wine Company. The owner, John is a great guy and we’d like to introduce you to CoWineCo.

Now watch as Mollie teaches us how to make a wine journal.

We found a few websites that have wine profiles on them. Here’s one that we thought was the most helpful from theCalifornia Winery Advisor: Wine Grape Varieties. Another good website is Professional Friends of Wine which has apage that takes you to different wine profiles. We’ll be putting those together for you in the future on our blog. Sally’s Place has a Wine Taster’s Glossary which we feel would totally come in handy if you were putting together a wine journal because we know that we don’t know all those terms right off the tops of our heads.

You can google wine aroma wheels to find one of your liking but we found one here that we liked.  We also came across this site that has flavor wheels (or uh, columns heh), not just for wine but for chocolate, coffee, beer, and just flavors in general.

Don’t forget to take Mollie’s advice and note those 3 important things in your wine journal: alcohol content, sweetness, and acidity, all based on taste.

Oh but remember to ask yourself the most important question of all:

Did you like it?

So let us know. We’ll be blogging our wine journals over on our personal blog and we hope you’ll join us!

Check out the Colorado Wine Company on their website, facebook and follow them on twitter!

Special thanks again to Mollie and John at CoWineCo!

Cheers!

ilovedrugs

Posted in Guest, Room 704, Vlogs | Leave a comment